Colloquium - Presenters

ABSTRACT

Cues such as the height of melody or the timing of a passage play a crucial role in conveying emotion. However, the historical meaning of these cues is not static—they have evolved alongside compositional practices. Composers have shifted the way they use cues over time, changing their “meaning” with regard to musical communication. To explore these shifts in Western keyboard compositions, we use two complementary statistical methods to disentangle the complex relationship between music and perception, quantifying both the effects and relative importance of cues. Our results suggest that mode, both individually and through its relationship with timing, strongly affects perceived emotion in music from the Baroque and Classical eras (within the sets of piano preludes included in our analysis). Conversely, mode’s relationship with pitch height rises in prominence for Romantic excerpts, and pitch overtakes mode in importance for Modern excerpts. These findings indicate shifts in cue “meaning” over time, with mode
decreasing, and pitch height increasing, in importance.

 

One striking trend that emerges is the declining role of mode in emotion perception over time. Although traditionally treated as a dichotomy—major or minor—composers in the late Romantic and modern eras increasingly blurred modal boundaries, making such binary classifications less applicable. This raises the question of whether mode can be understood along a continuum rather than a rigid category. By analyzing how musical cues covary and shift in importance over time, we came to explore the possibility of a relative mode continuum, measured through computational, analytical, and perceptual approaches. Each approach to quantifying relative mode is shown to be distinct with vastly different perspectives. However, despite their differences, our findings reveal a convergence in the values they produce, further reinforcing that relative mode is a meaningful and interpretable property of music. This perspective challenges traditional views of mode and allows for a more nuanced framework for understanding its role in musical history, particularly in eras where clear-cut modal distinctions no longer apply.

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KEYWORDS

Music emotion perception; historical changes; relative modality

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BIOS

Jackie Zhou

Jackie Zhou is a M.Sc student in the Music, Acoustics, Perception, and LEarning (MAPLE) Lab
at McMaster University, working on the Emotional Piano Project. Her passion for music began at
the age of four when she started learning the piano, and her interest in psychology developed
through various cognition courses. Now, her research explores how musical emotions are
communicated through audio features and how listeners perceive them. With a computational
background from her undergraduate studies, she investigates inconsistencies in music-related
machine learning algorithms, comparing computationally extracted features to score-based and
perceptual features in well-known historic keyboard music. Her work also explores different
approaches to quantifying relative mode, examining how mode can be represented beyond the
traditional major/minor dichotomy. By integrating computational, perceptual, and analytical
perspectives, she aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relativity of mode and its
implications for both music theory and computational modeling.
 

Aditi Shukla

Aditi Shukla is a first-year M.Sc student in the Music, Acoustics, Perception, and LEarning
(MAPLE) Lab at McMaster University, working on the Emotional Piano Project. She completed
her B.A. in Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, where she specialized in Music Cognition.
Growing up in a musical household, her personal love for music began the moment she picked
up the flute for the first time. She has been a part of multiple concert bands and plays the flute
and lyre. Her fourth-year thesis project focused on analyzing mode as a musical cue and how
expert music theorists perceive mode across different eras. Currently, her research delves into the
musicological and perceptual differences between the Classical and Romantic eras, exploring
how composers convey emotions within those eras, and how small changes in musical cue use
have led to drastic shifts in musical style over time.

 

Cameron Anderson
Cameron Anderson is a fourth-year PhD candidate in McMaster University’s MAPLE Lab. His
research focuses on how changes in musical expression throughout history affect composers’
musical choices, as well as listeners’ perceptions of conveyed emotion. He has also contributed
to work exploring how musical considerations can improve the design of auditory alarms in
medical environments. Cam holds a Bachelor of Music (Music Cognition spec.) and a Master of
Science in Psychology. Outside of the lab, he spends his free time practicing trombone,
composing music, and learning Spanish.